The world is changing. The demand for healthy alcoholic consumption is growing in demand. Have you imagined drinking a non-alcoholic beer but getting the ‘hoppy’ aroma and taste? Yes, Kampranis and his colleague Simon Dusséaux—both founders of the biotech company EvodiaBio Company have made a breakthrough innovation. They have created a non-alcoholic beer smell and taste like a regular ‘hoppy’ beer.
“Some people find the taste to be flat and watery and this has a natural explanation. What non-alcoholic beer lacks is the aroma from hops. When you remove the alcohol from the beer, for example by heating it up, you also kill the aroma that comes from hops. Other methods for making alcohol-free beer by minimizing fermentation also lead to poor aroma because alcohol is needed for hops to pass their unique flavor to the beer.”
According to Sotirios Kampranis, a Professor at the University of Copenhagen.
The team at EvodiaBio has decided to use baker’s yeast as a “natural platform for the sustainable production of natural aroma”. The yeast is currently extracted at a low yield from intensive farming or synthesized by petrochemistry. The natural aromas from this blend are suggested as a substitute for fresh hops, pellets, or hop oil.
“After years of research, we have found a way to produce a group of small molecules called monoterpenoids, which provide the hoppy flavor, and then add them to the beer at the end of the brewing process to give it back its lost flavor. No one has been able to do this before, so it’s a game-changer for non-alcoholic beer.”
says Sotirios Kampranis.
Instead of adding expensive aroma hops in the brewing tank, just to “throw away” their flavor at the end of the process, the researchers have turned baker’s yeast cells into micro-factories that can be grown in fermenters and release the aroma of hops. This method produces high aroma non-alcoholic beer, they state in a newly published study.
“When the hop aroma molecules are released from yeast, we collect them and put them into the beer, giving back the taste of regular beer that so many of us know and love. It actually makes the use of aroma hops in brewing redundant, because we only need the molecules passing on the scent and flavor and not the actual hops.”
says Sotirios Kampranis.
This approach is more sustainable. The natural aromatic non-alcoholic beer-making tackles two problems as told by phys org (https://phys.org/news/2022-02-non-alcoholic-beer-regular.html ):
First of all, aroma hops are mainly farmed on the west coast of the U.S., which causes the need for extensive transportation and cooling down the crops in refrigerators.
Secondly, hops demand lots of water—more accurately you need 2.7 tons of water to grow one kilogram of hops. This combined makes it a not very climate-friendly production.
“With our method, we skip aroma hops altogether and thereby also the water and the transportation. This means that one kilogram of hops aroma can be produced with more than 10.000 times less water and more than 100 times less CO2. Long term, we hope to change the brewing industry with our method—also the production of regular beer, where the use of aroma hops is also very wasteful.”
says Sotirios Kampranis.
The method is already being tested in breweries in Denmark and the plan is to have the technique ready for the entire brewing industry in October 2022.
For more updates on the research and EvodiaBio Company, click here , and https://bii.dk/news/meet-the-start-ups-evodia-bio/
Video- https://videopress.com/v/3EsKIfxE
Through the research, the team at EvodiaBio enables the customer to have a non-alcoholic beer that has the flavor, excitement, aroma, and hoppy taste just like a regular beer. A healthy and sustainable alternative without compromise on the taste.